


Proposals and Attachments

by Asuka Kureru (Askerian)



Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: F/F, Friends to Lovers, Marriage Proposal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-21
Updated: 2018-09-21
Packaged: 2019-07-15 04:19:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16055417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askerian/pseuds/Asuka%20Kureru
Summary: "Anyway," Seffie muttered. "Can you believe Martellus had the nerve to joke I was officially getting long in the tooth. Martellus!""I've got a free plot at the Père Lachaise," Colette offered casually. Seffie snorted despite herself. "So what's wrong with your possible spouses, then?"





	Proposals and Attachments

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Luunyscarlet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luunyscarlet/gifts).



> Thiis was supposed to be for the prompts "Wedding" and "Pregnancy" aaand i started it so early it ended up being about proposals instead. Whoops.

"Ugh! All my marriage prospects are horrible."

Colette hummed her acknowledgement as she made annotations in her report. Seffie sighed, sank a little deeper in the sinfully comfortable massaging armchair Colette kept by the window that just so happened to set off her coloring and match exactly nothing else in the Master of Paris' private office.

"I shouldn't have waited so long on Gil," Seffie admitted more quietly, winding a lock of hair around her hand tight and tighter until it ached.

"I'm not going to agree on that," Colette replied, almost absently. Seffie straightened up, looked at her, startled. Colette's head was still bent over her report, carefully non-confrontational, like she didn't want to hurt her feelings any more than necessary. "The chances of him agreeing to marriage were low, but you could never have moved on to another match while it was still a possibility. You needed to explore it to the end."

"... Heh. Low, huh?"

"Frankly, if Agatha had stayed dead, and your cousins kept on being pains about his respectability -- I would have put it at forty percent chances." She looked up, then, meeting Seffie's eyes with rueful understanding. "But even then he would never have felt passionate about you. That boy is a sparkophiliac if I've ever seen one."

Seffie grumbled under her breath and burrowed into the chair, which obligingly started working on her knotted-up shoulders.

"Anyway," she muttered. "Can you believe Martellus had the nerve to joke I was officially getting long in the tooth. Martellus!"

"I've got a free plot at the Père Lachaise," Colette offered casually. Seffie snorted despite herself. "So what's wrong with your possible spouses, then?"

Seffie knew very well that Colette could figure it out herself and was just giving her an excuse to rant, but she ranted anyway. "Ugh! Everybody else is either _already_ one of our allies, therefore brings us _nothing_ as a political match, _poorer_ than us, plotting _against_ us but aren't likely to let me have a single opening to bring them down _and-or_ they're not even _that_ much of a problem that we would need to go for a tragic young widow plot and waste several years of my life and my tender innocence to mourning, or they're shooting above their station and I'm a duke's daughter, Colette, my grandmother is a bloody princess! Am I supposed to go for a _baron?_ "

She deflated, sighing; brought her feet on the cushion like a child to hug her knees.

"At least make it a baron with actual power. Not a ... _baron,_ baron. Plus Grandmother mentioned I was looking during a family reunion and now everyone and their dog is sending me suggestions and trying to veto each other's choices. Ugh. They'll never agree on anything and it doesn't matter in the end because they don't get a vote but I'd still like to keep the complaining to a dull roar."

"How high do you place getting along with your spouse in your parameters?" Colette asked, putting an elbow on her desk so she could prop her jaw into it, leaning with her shoulder. She'd done away with her wig and her hair was free in hundreds of springlike curls, still short enough to puff up with no regard for gravity. "I'm not saying to shoot for someone who has your exact agenda -- short of going the Other route that may be impossible. But how about friendly competition?"

"That would be the Holy Grail," Seffie sighed out, slumping some more, utterly unladylike. "Frankly someone with my exact agenda would be so boring. And redundant! We'd make more progress separate. A friendly adversary..."

Colette smiled, long and lopsided, eyes hooded with amusement. "Sexual compatibility?"

"Oh, ma chère," Seffie tittered, laughing. "Incompatibility is only a problem when you're being cheap with your equipment. There are shops for that."

Colette grinned back. "I'm glad to hear that. I heard the Master of Paris was still single."

The only reason Seffie didn't rear herself right off her chair and onto the floor was that it had felt her sudden tension and started vibrating her into a floppy puddle.

"You wh --" No, she'd heard fine. "Is this a j--" It was. And it wasn't. Not with that patient look on her face.

Marrying Colette. Her best friend and most entertaining enemy.

Colette who had a special chair in royal blues, silvers and the exact red of her hair in her private sanctuary.

"Is it that you've never thought about women or that you've never thought about me?"

Seffie sputtered for a second. "Well, in most places the woman offering can't actually _alter the law_ \--"

"Papa changed it when I was thirteen." Colette chuckled through a melancholic smile. "While I still thought I was being discreet."

"Oh. Embarrassing, but sweet -- Anyway, it wasn't a viable possibility!" Oh dear, her cheeks were red and also her nails were digging upholstery out of her personal chair. That Colette had probably built for her. To her exact measurements.

That... was a bit _intense_. Wasn't it.

Huh.

"Seffie, chérie?"

"I was just thinking that you knew all my measurements," Seffie said without thought, staring hard.

Colette coughed in her fist, mostly to hide a laugh. "Is that too invasive?"

"It's probably the least personal thing you know about me without me personally telling you," Seffie replied, waving it off. "But it's. It's..."

"Bad?"

Seffie figured it out, suddenly -- and her porcelain-pale face heated up all at once. It _was_ invasive and intense, ignoring propriety.

Because Colette did desire women -- and Seffie had known for years, and had known that amongst all the things Colette appreciated in their friendship Seffie's aesthetic merits were definitely on the list -- had known and been _fine with_ and _amused by_ \-- but if Colette was asking for her hand in marriage then _she desired Seffie._

Seffie had never been the one who was pursued.

" _Not_ bad," she said, and it came out squeaky and breathless, horribly embarrassing. "Ah. Still going to require some... thought. Ponderings. Expectation recalibration... Things. But _Count Wolkerstorfer_ was on the list, and he's forty years my senior and also seventy percent magnets, and there would still have been. You know. Marital duties."

Colette started laughing, eyes crinkling hard, shoulders shaking with mirth. "At least he'd have an easy time swapping around his _attachments_. Oh, do I really want to stand in the way of your marital bliss--"

Seffie threw her handful of gears and fluff at her head. "Don't you _dare_ take it back! _You_ asked for my hand, if you spurn me now--"

"Yes?" Colette purred, leaning over her desk, eyes gleaming challenge. Had her smiles always been so... toothy? "What unholy vengeance will you wreak upon me and mine? Do tell, ma jolie."

"I'll," Seffie started, stalled.

The Master of Paris. The most powerful spark in all of France -- in political power, and in dangerosity too, even if part of that was from standing on her genius father's shoulders. Colette was a deft hand at social engineering and calmer politics but no one would think her a pushover if it came to warfare either, no one would think she hadn't mastered every single defense the town had accumulated in the last centuries. One of the best strongholds amidst the wastelands, and the biggest.

She wanted Seffie?

"I'm not bringing enough to the table to make it fair," she said, brutally sobered. "It'd be different if Martellus stayed the Storm King. I'm a first cousin, but not a favored one. Money-wise... You don't need anything I may bring. And even Grandmother bows to you in your domain in the end, and you _never leave it_."

Colette blinked, straightened up. "Seffie--"

"You're putting emotions above logic. I -- can't let you do that."

She really couldn't.

It'd be one thing if she had seduced Colette into it. Another one of their games, that Colette had happened to lose. Like this, as a gift? It felt like... not quite like a handout. Like she was tricking Colette, but not in the... not in the right way, not --

"Xerxsephnia von Blitzengaard," Colette said, intense and direct. 

She looked taller somehow, even though she hadn't even moved. Taller and more present, more... More.

"The war with the Other will force Us to open up. To seek and bind allies. To set up another Europan alliance, a second Shining Coalition. We do _not_ have the contacts, and we do not have the trusted agents given leave to be Our voice outside of Paris, and make binding contracts that engage Us in meetings We cannot physically go to, but cannot spurn either."

"--Ah--"

"Our spouse would therefore be that voice."

"...Oh."

"And I need every single contact you and your grandmother can scrounge up -- and I don't _need_ you to bridge a bond with the Heterodyne and Baron Wulfenbach and the Storm King, but tell me again how it might hurt for my wife to be friendly with two out of the three. You don't bring me nothing new, Seffie," she added, more gently. "You bring me the outside world beyond my walls. And I am absolutely going to trust you to be my proxy."

"... _Oh_."

"With caveats, of course," Colette added with a soft teasing glint in her eyes, and stood. "But I believe you have as much desire for the Other to reign as I do, so on that -- I will trust you."

She moved in front of Seffie's chair, held out her hand, palm up.

"What do you say? Xerxsephnia Voltaire?"

Seffie snorted despite herself, grinned with her hand landing almost of its own will in Colette's palm. "Von Blitzengaard-Voltaire, please," she said, giddy with surprise and odd glee. "You must be the only person in the world who might want me for my family, so we may as well flaunt it."

"Oh dear," Colette said with fake chagrin, even as she pulled her up by the hand. "I'm going to have to let them in for the wedding. I don't suppose your grandmother would go for a tag and release system, lest they get lost in my streets. Or under my streets."

Seffie giggled like an adolescent, face hot and tingly with their closeness. Colette wanted her. Colette was _pursuing_ her. Colette thought she was the best partner in crime _and_ thought about her... intimate proportions. It almost didn't matter that Seffie didn't yet know if she would be able to desire her directly -- being desired was almost as potent a drug, and a friendly roll in the sheets... "Oh, none of them will _stay_ on the streets, dear, that's not where the juicy secrets are." 

"So I should prepare myself for a redhead infestation," Colette sighed.

Then she gave Seffie another smile, forehead against forehead; squeezed her hand, and then lifted it to her mouth and kissed it genteelly, lips barely brushing skin.

Seffie squeaked, red-hot to her forehead. "Oh please! Since when are you so proper--"

She was whirled around -- with enough of a lead-up that she didn't react on instinct as if attacked, but fast enough that she still gasped, eyes wide, when she ended up pushed atop the desk.

"Oh, ma belle, ma biche, si tu veux une débauchée--"

Good lord. Actual french flirting with pet names and _debauchery_. Colette's eyes positively sparkled with held-back laughter. Seffie burst out laughing; then she laced her hands together behind Colette's neck, and pulled her down, so the girl could put her money where he mouth was.

Or her mouth where her... word was.

Kissing another woman wasn't half-bad, actually. Was even... Oh. Breasts.

Mouth. On her neck. Hands, possessive caresses down her flanks, squeezing gently over her corset. Rueful smile.

"I should perhaps not actually debauch you on a desk I want to keep using afterwards, though. And this might be taking too much liberties..."

"Pish! We're fiancées," Seffie said, challenging and dizzy. "Live a little. Who's going to know?"

Apart from her Smoke Knight. Heh. Poor Varpa.

"--I don't have any, heh, attachments at hand, though, but let me see what I can figure out," Colette said, raising her head to let her eyes roam over her office with the half-distracted, half-too-intense look of the spark planning to Build a Thing.

"If you get lost in a fugue about attachments and neglect _actually using them_ I will use them to beat you to death," Seffie said pointedly. "You can look at it as a preliminary data collection session," she added, conciliatory, and tried out her best smoulder.

"Why, ma jolie, those are flirting words." Chuckling down at her, Colette leaned back down to steal another kiss, and a bit more than that.

\--

"But who will carry the children, though," she asked later on as they cuddled in her chair. (The thing unfolded into a _lounging chaise_. Seffie would have said Colette had very high expectations but she'd turned out to be right to have them, so.) "I have my girlish figure to think of, and you've got both the hips and the familial antecedents for it..."

"My father didn't have to carry them himself. I think you'll find that curtails my desire to outbreed a rabbit warren almost as much as _actually living with my siblings_."

"Heh. One each?"

"One each."


End file.
